Bernard Diederich

BERNARD DIEDERICH is a New Zealand-born author, journalist, and historian. After a serving in the Pacific theatre of World War II, he settled in Haiti in 1949. The following year he set up an English-language weekly newspaper, the Haiti Sun, and became the resident correspondent for the Associated Press, the New York Times, the Time-Life News Service and the Daily Telegraph.

Exiled from Haiti in 1963 by Papa Doc Duvalier, he settled in the Dominican Republic and concentrated on his career in journalism. Later postings for Time Magazine included Mexico City and Miami, and his close encounters with dictators and death provided an abundance of news stories covering coups, revolutions, invasions, earthquakes, hurricanes and volcanic eruptions as well as a wealth of material for his books about the politics and political leaders of the Caribbean and Central America.

Diederich was finally allowed to return to Haiti in 1980 to interview Baby Doc Duvalier and his new wife Michèle, and he was then able to report on the popular uprising that sent them both into exile in 1986. He now splits his time between Miami and Port-au-Prince, Haiti. It was in the Haitian capital in 1954 that Diederich first met Graham Greene. This led to a life-long friendship, much of it based on a shared love of Haiti, which only ended with Greene's death in 1991.